All of the major political parties use Facebook to target adverts at certain demographics (like people who hate wind farms for example), but ever since Facebook voluntarily brought in new rules to force political advertisers to log the ads they've been sending out, we've had the ability to look through the stuff they're sending out.
In the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election they sent out this sponsored advert declaring "No New Wind Farms - Vote Conservative".
You can see this advert registered in the Facebook Ad Library (you need to scroll down a few rows to see it, because Facebook doesn't allow you to link to a specific ad for some reason).
The advert was clearly only intended for the consumption of a certain demographic the Tories have identified as people who dislike wind farms, mainly women over the age of 44 for some reason.
This anti-environmental advert was obviously never intended for mass public consumption, because it clashes so glaringly with all of their "greenwash" about caring for the environment, which even goes as far as pinching EU anti-plastic pollution policies that were opposed in the European parliament by Tory MEPs to present them as Tory innovations!
So it would obviously be a terrible shame for the Tory party if people widely shared this article detailing what they're sending out to particular demographics when they think nobody else is looking wouldn't it?
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When the Labour-defecting MP Angela Smith made her weird and racist comments about British Asians being "funny tinge" on the big day these splitters had been plotting for months, this racist gaffe was obviously going to attract a lot of ridicule.
The mess was made even worse when Smith and her fellow splitter MPs decided that there should be no disciplinary process, and agreed the line that she only spouted racist remarks because she was "very tired" (is it just me or is 'I was only racist because I was tired' an extraordinary excuse that implies racism is an inherent attribute that is always there, but only leaks out under conditions like tiredness, stress, or drunkenness?).
For context this is a bunch of MPs who spent months bitterly attacking Labour's internal processes for dealing with bigotry, who then immediately give one of their own MPs a total free pass on a bizarre outburst of 1970s-style racism, revealing the fact that they have absolutely no disciplinary procedures at all for dealing with racism in the ranks!
This shockingly lax attitude to dealing with racism is hardly surprising from a group who all either abstained on, or actually voted in favour of Theresa may's racist "Hostile Environment" legislation that created the Windrush Scandal, and resulted in black Britons being deported to their deaths overseas.
This bizarre and hypocritical "funny tinge" episode was always going to provoke derision, and the word "tinge" has subsequently been used to ridicule the Independent Group.
Nicknames, satire, and political shorthand have always been a fundamental part of UK political discourse, but ever since "tinge" became a thing there have been an awful lot of people turning up in comments threads to cry that calling Independent Group "tinge" is unfair, improper, offensive, and even Trumpian!
Amazingly these are people who will willingly and uncritically accept the explanation that Angela Smith slurred British Asians as "funny tinges" because she was "very tired" but then get hyper-offended at other people using the term "tinge" to refer to the group of MPs who continue to side with Smith, and who fully accept her outrageous 'I was only racist because I was tired' excuse!
In this warped worldview it's apparently perfectly fine to refer to the "tinge" of British Asians' skin as being "funny", but then unspeakably offensive to use the word "tinge" as satirical shorthand for the group the woman who did this belongs to!
The same thing happens when you use the political shorthand "parliamentary squatters" to describe the fact these MPs have refused to call by-elections in their constituencies because they're a bunch of democracy-fearing cowards who know they'd lose their seats if they actually put their divisive and egotistical actions to the vote.
The reason pro-austerity centrists are getting so upset about the use of satirical shorthand like "tinge" and "squatter" to describe the Independent Group actually has nothing to do with these words being offensive in their own right, it's that these people know that satire and shorthand are very effective ways of influencing public opinion.
If nicknames and descriptions like "tinge" and "squatter" are allowed to stick, people will be continually reminded about this group's shockingly lax attitude to racism in their ranks and the fact that they're so terrified of democracy that they're treating the constituencies that elected them with contempt.
So they react with outrage, and attempt to impose a form of political correctness to police political satire (meta political correctness if you like) because they desperately want to stamp out the kind of political satire that satirises the opaquely funded, self-serving, Tory-facilitating, pro-austerity centrism they approve of.
These people are not upset because the words "tinge" and "squatter" are offensive, they're upset because they're effective.
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All 11 of the MPs to have joined the Independent Group have outright declared their intentions to squat in their parliamentary seats without calling by-elections to put their defections to the electoral test.
This behaviour is technically within the rules, although 2 MPs who defected from David Cameron's Tories to UKIP back in 2014 (Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless) tried to set the electoral precedent that political defectors should respect democracy and call by-elections.
The problem of course is that this refusal to call by-elections to give their constituents another say under the dramatically changed circumstances is that it betrays a searing hypocrisy because they all also advocate another Brexit referendum.
These people believe in putting things to the vote again when it suits their interests, but vehemently oppose the idea of voting again when they'd be in danger of losing their privileged positions in parliament.
This hypocrisy is so obvious, and so clearly motivated by self-interest and entitlement that it's obviously going to be a massive problem for everyone in the another referendum campaign.
Not only are People's Vote advocates going to have to deal with the (unfair and manipulative) characterisation that they're a "sore loser" campaign, they're now also going to have to deal with (entirely legitimate and justified) criticism of this extraordinary anti-democratic hypocrisy from 11 of their most high profile advocates.
If I was involved in the People's Vote campaign I'd be absolutely furious with these self-serving narcissistic cowards for giving opponents an absolutely devastating attack point, but somehow no.
Not only are the anti-Brexit pockets of the Internet so busy having raptures about the formation of this new opaquely funded pro-austerity "centrist" party that they can't even see that it's actually a massive distraction from the fact that a Tory Brexit meltdown is less than 1,000 hours away, they also refuse to see that this self-serving refusal to call by-elections is such glaring hypocrisy that it's created a devastating attack point against the People's Vote campaign.
What's even more concerning from a Brexit-sceptic perspective is that several of these people are the same strategically inept idiots who tied the nation up in a pointless and self-serving Anyone But Corbyn coup plot in the immediate aftermath of Brexit.
When the nation desperately needed to focus on coherent objectives (like fixing blame for the Brexit chaos squarely on the Tories who delivered it, demanding a wide ranging Brexit commission instead of allowing Theresa May to run it as a closed Tory shop exclusively for Tory party advantage, and unifying the Brexit resistance rather than creating even more divisions) Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, Mike Gapes and their ilk instead delivered a massive political distraction by seeking to undermine the will of the Labour Party membership with a naval-gazing coup plot they'd been planning to launch for weeks beforehand, no matter what the outcome of the Brexit referendum.
Instead of any coherent form of action to deal with the Tory Brexit mess these idiots completely wasted the vital first few months on a brazenly self-serving, ridiculously divisive, and spectacularly failed anti-Corbyn coup that actually ended up actually increasing Corbyn's legitimacy as Labour leader with a resounding double-mandate from party members!
The anti-democratic and profoundly hypocritical way this political squatter group has been formed is proof that they've learned absolutely nothing about the elitist self-serving attitudes that resulted in their previous humiliating failure.
By refusing to call by-elections they're demonstrating exactly the same elitist entitlement as before, and by handing Brexiteers a devastating attack point to undermine calls for another referendum, they're in danger of delivering another spectacular political whopping by their political opponents too.
Just when the nation needs strong leadership in the face of an impending Tory Brexit meltdown, the same useless bunch of strategically inept, ridiculously self-serving, democracy-defying political narcissists have pushed themselves to centre stage in such a tone-deaf and hypocritical manner that they're actually freely handing out ammunition to their political opponents.
If this ludicrously unprincipled vanity project is really the best our political system can come up with in the face of an unprecedented self-inflicted socio-economic disaster looming on the horizon, we're absolutely fucked aren't we?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The mainstream media reaction to the Labour Party loss in the Copeland by-election was utterly predictable. The ubiquitous blame-Corbyn narratives were identical to those scratched together in anticipation of the 2016 Local Election catastrophe that failed to actually materialise.
Of course Jeremy Corbyn isn't entirely blameless when it comes to the Copeland result, but the mainstream narrative that the blame is essentially his has been well and truly set, and the mindless political rote-learner drones are out in force spewing this simplistic trope as if it's their own carefully considered opinion rather than something they're repeating without even bothering to think more deeply about things for themselves.
In this article I'm going to take a quick look at some factors other than Jeremy Corbyn's competence that influenced the Copeland result, including the really big story that the mainstream press more-or-less ignored in their haste to damn Jeremy Corbyn.
A long-term decline
Copeland had been Labour Party territory for decades, but anyone claiming it was anything but a marginal constituency is dealing in pure political fiction. The Labour high-point in Copeland came in 1997 when Jack Cunningham won the seat with 58% of the vote. Ever since then the Labour Party has been on a downwards trajectory in Copeland. They lost 6.4% of the vote in 2001, another 1.3% in 2005, another 4.5% of the vote in 2010 and yet another 3.7% in 2015.
The 2017 by-election saw yet another decline in the Labour vote share of 4.9%. That's five elections in a row where Labour lost popularity in Copeland. If Corbyn is to be blamed for this loss, the blame has to be put in its proper context. Corbyn clearly didn't cause the long-term decline in the Labour vote, but he did fail to reverse it.
Even if ...
Even if Corbyn's Labour had've managed to stop the decline in the Labour vote share they would still have lost the Copeland by-election. 42.3% of the vote was enough for Jamie Reed to win in 2015, but it would only have been good enough for second place in the 2017 by-election because the Tory candidate bagged 44.3% of the vote.
The real story
The real story in Copeland is how the Tories managed to leapfrog Labour to such an extent that Labour would still have lost if their vote share remained the same from the 2015 General Election.
The answer is the collapse in the UKIP vote. UKIP's vote share fell from 15.5% in 2015 to just 6.5% in 2017. This 9% fall in their vote share is almost exactly matched by the Tories 8.5% increase.
The real story is that Ukippers are abandoning their party in droves in order to throw their support behind the Tories now that Theresa May is pushing a rabidly right-wing authoritarian more-UKIP-than-UKIP political agenda.
On the national scale
This drift of Ukippers into the arms of Theresa May's brand of savagely right-wing authoritarianism is being repeated across the country. In the run up to the 2016 EU referendum UKIP consistently polled above 15%, within less than a year they're averaging below 12% and gradually slipping further.
It's pretty difficult to imagine Ukippers defecting to the Europhile Lib-Dems or to a Labour Party that is far more focused on internal factional squabbling than actually defining a coherent party line on the utter shambles Theresa May is making of Brexit. 'Kippers are clearly defecting to the Tories because they're attracted by Theresa May's more-UKIP-than-UKIP posturing.
Ideological blood brothers
UKIP and the Tories are ideological blood brothers. A look at the UKIP ranks stuffed full of failed, disgraced and defected Tories should be enough to convince anyone of the fact that UKIP are a Tory Trojan Horse of a political party. Then there's the fact that UKIP is almost totally bankrolled by Tory money too.
UKIP dragging the UK political spectrum way off to the right and then gradually folding themselves back into the Tory party was always inevitable. As the single issue party that no longer actually has a single issue inevitably loses votes, it's obvious that a Tory government that insists on aping Ukipper anti-European posturing and anti-immigration rhetoric is going to be the main beneficiary.
What now?
If the UKIP vote continues leeching to the Tory party, England is going to end up as a de facto one party state. The Tories already have a considerable electoral advantage, and if they pick up another four or five percentage points from UKIP and succeed in gerrymandering the political boundaries too, there will be virtually no chance of removing them from power for the foreseeable future.
The entrenchment of Tory rule seems inevitable whether Labour is led by Jeremy Corbyn, or by some as-yet-unnamed alternative figure who is somehow more popular and talented than any of the numerous leadership challengers Corbyn has seen off with total ease (Owen Smith, Angela Eagle, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendal).
Even if Labour were unified and promoting consistent and engaging political alternatives they would be facing an uphill challenge given the inevitable leeching of support from UKIP to the Tories, but in their current state it's looking absolutely futile. Aside from the incessant and incredibly damaging internal bickering there's also the fact that English Labour Party bigwigs like Sadiq Khan insist on nailing Scottish Labour into their self-made coffin with insulting out-of-touch rhetoric about how the majority of working age Scots are a bunch of racists for daring to want independence from Westminster establishment rule.
Even if the Labour Party were capable of solidarity and strategic competence they'd be facing tough times, but in their current guise they're totally screwed, and anyone within the Labour Party trying to pin the blame for that solely on Jeremy Corbyn is clearly more guilty than he is.
Corbyn can't help being a limited and unengaging public speaker. Neither can he help the fact that talent is so thin in the Labour Party ranks that he's seen off all leadership challengers with total ease. However the internal party critics could have actually tried to help him rather than constantly plotting, backstabbing and briefing against him to the press and then crowing deliriously when Labour actually lose elections!
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
UKIP have clearly learned from the fake news epidemic that swept Donald Trump into the White House, and they're trying to imitate it in their own pathetically amateurish way.The first example of UKIP fake news aimed at influencing the Stoke Central by-election was a pathetically shoddy photoshopped image claiming that Stoke residents were hanging out St George's crosses in order to protest against "unpatriotic" Jeremy Corbyn.
As the Skwawkbox blog pointed out, not only was the image crudely and obviously photoshopped, the Ukipper that did it actually got the flag the wrong way up, which is considered a grave insult in the world of vexillology.
If anyone is "unpatriotic" it's clearly the Ukipper who thought it was fine to photoshop an upside down English flag onto some random house in Stoke.
Soon after the Fake flag protest picture was exposed another one soon appeared, this time showing the Labour by-election candidate Gareth Snell with a burka clad woman. It didn't take much investigation to find the original photo, which was a publicity shot of Gareth Snell with the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The first image demonstrated the grotesquely ignorant brand of nationalism promoted by extreme right groups like UKIP and Britain First by getting the flag upside down.
The second demonstrates something a lot more distasteful. It clearly shows the Ukipper assumption that the people of Stoke are a bunch of gullible bigots. Whoever decided to turn Jeremy Corbyn into a burka clad woman made two obvious assumptions about the people of Stoke: Firstly that they're gullible enough to fall for another crudely photoshopped image, and secondly that they must be such a bunch of bigots that they'd find a picture of a woman in a burka so terrifying that they'd rush off and vote for UKIP.
I hope the people of Stoke Central are smart enough to see through this appalling fake news bullshit from UKIP, and hand the NHS-hating local address-faking hard-right charlatan Paul Nuttall the electoral defeat he so richly deserves.
If you know anyone who lives in Stoke, or anyone with connections to the city, please consider sharing this article with them to help to publicise the disgusting dirty tricks that UKIP are employing to in order to dupe Stokies into voting for their extreme-right Thatcherism on steroids party.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I've pointed out the bizarrely divisive habit of Anyone But Corbyn Labour Party people wildly celebrating every Labour by-election loss on Twitter several times before, but the spate of celebrations over Labour's loss to the Lib-Dems in the Mosborough Ward in Sheffield on Thursday September 8th really does take the biscuit.
In all of the gloating and celebration over this Labour Party loss from Anti-Corbyn Labour members, one of the crucial facts they all *forgot* to mention is that the Labour candidate Julie Grocutt was staunchly anti-Corbyn. She refused to include the party leader on her campaign leaflets, repeatedly spread anti-Corbyn propaganda on Twitter (that she has subsequently hidden by deleting her account) and openly admitted that she went around the ward having chit chats with people about how terrible the Labour Party leader is (before she deleted her Twitter account)!
Another thing the Anyone But Corbyn camp failed to mention is that the Lib-Dem candidate Gail Smith was a popular former councillor who was seeking a return to local government after she was one of the many thousands of Lib-Dems in local government to suffer the furious public backlash against Nick Clegg's appalling collusion with the Tories during the Coalition government years.
Another thing these blinkered anti-Corbyn ranters routinely failed to mention in their gloating was that the Labour candidate didn't even live in the ward and the Lib-Dem candidate did. This is probably a bigger issue than all of the other stuff added together because as the local journalist Chris Burn pointed out, it's "not unreasonable for people to vote for a local councillor who actually lives locally".
Yet another thing that anti-Corbyn ranters *forgot* to mention was that the turnout was an appallingly low 28%. It's absolutely clear that the Labour vote in the ward stayed at home. Could this poor Labour turnout have anything to do with the Labour candidate being a supporter of the Anyone But Corbyn coup who also happens to lives 16 miles away in Stocksbridge on the other side of the city?
Of course not the ABC lot will say. "it's all Jeremy Corbyn's fault"!
Just a few weeks after Jeremy Corbyn secured a huge turnout at a rally in Sheffield, the Labour candidate took the electorally dubious decision to run an anti-Corbyn campaign that saw the Labour Party percentage of the vote in the ward slump by 9.2% which allowed the Lib-Dem candidate to storm past Labour to victory. But instead of admit that her divisive anti-Corbyn views ensured the low Labour turnout that cost her the election, Grocutt actually had the brass neck to try to blame Corbyn for the loss!
Grocutt was far from the only person from the Anyone But Corbyn camp to try to use her by-election loss as ammunition against Corbyn. The shadowy "Saving Labour" lot (where exactly does all of their funding come from?) took to gloating about it; The Daily Mirror once again exposed their glaring anti-Corbyn bias by painting the loss as a disaster for Corbyn without even bothering to mention the staunchly anti-Corbyn views of the candidate; and savagely Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs like Ian Austin, Wes Streeting and Tom Blenkinsop took to Twitter bragging about how the defeat of their fellow anti-Corbyn coup-supporter is somehow a massive blow for Corbyn!
Even Owen Smith's floundering leadership campaign got in on the act by trying to blame Corbyn supporters for the loss as if they should have all rallied around and actually helped a divisive anti-Corbyn candidate into local government! Maybe if Grocutt wanted even more help from Momentum activists than the help she got, perhaps she should have considered supporting him rather than repeatedly slagging him off on Twitter? Or at the very least toning down the anti-Corbyn rhetoric a bit and expressing a desire to work with whoever becomes party leader on September 24th?
The Anyone But Corbyn habit of using the post-coup Labour Party poll slump that they caused with their ridiculous ill-timed, ineptly executed and woefully failing putsch attempt is bad enough, but actively gloating over an anti-Corbyn local election candidate handing the Lib-Dems a shock by-election steal is even worse.
The gleeful Twitter celebrations from the Anyone But Corbyn camp every time Labour lose a by-election are outrageous enough in their own right (especially considering some of the utterly trivial things Corbyn supporters have been purged from the party for), but using the abject failure of one of their fellow divisive anti-Corbyn coup-plot supporter in order to paint Corbyn as "unelectable" really is unbelievably egregious stuff.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
